Series Site
The zombie of American cinema has always proven especially adept at communicating specifically Black anxieties: a class of creatures, not alive and not quite dead, their bodies untethered from their own will, helplessly bound as they are to do the bidding of one sinister master. Historically inspired more by the paranoid colonial writings of William Seabrook in The Magic Island (1929) than the “zombi” of Haitian Vodou, the cinematic zombie has often unwittingly become a reflection of the monstrous evil that first wrought it. Thus, the cinematic zombie, although born of the African diaspora, may not be Black at all, but inescapably white—a creature that embodies the imperialistic project itself—one that seeks to reduce its denizens to mere bodies, violently charged to spread hegemony and empire. This series, beginning with the Bela Lugosi horror classic White Zombie (1932), pictured above, will chart the zombie’s propensity to mirror not just the horror of imperialism but also a multitude of its anxieties, from miscegenation to war. But even as the zombie over the years migrated away from its Black origins, the figure has struggled to become fully raceless or to shed its roots in imperialistic exploits. Guest programmed by Kelli Weston.